@Teresa Bolen first let me thank you for all of your thoughts so far. The team and I really appreciate all the feedback you're giving us for the site. It's making a huge difference. Right now there's no ability to DM, but we might introduce it later on. It would be difficult for me to go into the technical details, but it's a lot more difficult to manage and we would need a much larger team to implement it. On top of that we want to try to emphasize the community first and foremost to generate discussion. That's harder to do when everyone is privately dm'ing each other. However, we also recognize the importance of having the ability to DM and it's something that we could add later on as the site matures. The idea behind upvoting is to push the best and the most useful content to the top (like reddit or YouTube). It also discourages fake liking which can sometimes happen on twitter and instagram where you get people swapping likes to try and gain attention/followers. There's pros and cons to each system, but we're trying this one for now. We figured that comments would be the ultimate form of support if you really liked someone's work. I'm not sure @Stan Prokopenko has thought about this, but it's an interesting idea. Like @pinkapricorn mentioned below, "one important thing for this site will be keeping the small-group feel as it gets larger. If you regularly interact with a finite number of people, you naturally build community. But if there are so many people coming and going that you rarely talk to the same person more than once, they feel like nothing and you just feel lost in a sea of faces. My experience anyways. If I'm on a site where everybody is a perpetual stranger to me, it's almost as lonely as being alone." I agree with that statement and I think there is a chance of interacting and growing more if individuals can be in smaller groups that they're familiar with. The challenge is figuring out the right size of those groups and if those groups can maintain being active. My belief is that we'll need to grow larger first before we can start offering smaller groups. Otherwise we might end up with a lot of tiny group ghost towns. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts! Keep'm coming!

@Teresa Bolen I think one important thing for this site will be keeping the small-group feel as it gets larger. If you regularly interact with a finite number of people, you naturally build community. But if there are so many people coming and going that you rarely talk to the same person more than once, they feel like nothing and you just feel lost in a sea of faces. My experience anyways. If I'm on a site where everybody is a perpetual stranger to me, it's almost as lonely as being alone. So that's why I think there will need to be subgroups of limited size.

I was actually looking for a new communal studio space (having just moved to a new and more expensive city) just before the pandemic shut things down here. Not that I really need a separate studio to work, but I have always found that the connections of having an art/business space with other like minded people in my local area invaluable. Also working at home alone, stuck in my own head with nobody to bounce ideas off tends to make me loopy. I hadn't even really thought to try and make community happen online before and, to be honest, I'm not entirely convinced it can - but I am willing to try it! I think some sort of community groups would be a good idea, though I have generally found that the diversity of disciplines that inhabit the same space in a communal studio broadens your horizons and opens you up to new things, whereas on the internet you can go directly to the exact thing you want with people who hold the exact same ideas and never really learn anything. This is probably the most I have interacted online ever so that's a good start!

I second everything you said. Joining an art community is actually a big challenge for me. I have little to no connections to other artists and I don't know exactly how to proceed. Concept.org used to be a huge place to discuss and share advice with other artists but it's gone now...